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• W4386073663 abstract "Deirdre McCloskey thinks (p. 24) that an ‘illiberal and unscientific line’ of thought emerged in the nineteenth century and has taken over economics, which has been engaged in an attack on capitalism (though that is a word McCloskey dislikes) and libertarian thinking since 1848. The idea that economics is anti-capitalism will raise more eyebrows. To the outsider, this seems like a surprising judgement. It is often enough said that economics has got lost in a wilderness of pointless formalism that seems detached from the facts (‘let's assume agents have complete information about the underlying stochastic processes’). You seldom hear McCloskey's corollary, namely that the unreal picture of human agents is a product of a distrust of the ability of actual humans to flourish without government direction. The book comes in three parts. The first part is a series of essays arguing that modern economics is in moral and scientific disarray. The middle third attacks neoinstitutionalism, and the final chapters complain that contemporary economics needs a normative reorientation to become ‘humanomics’, offering an enriched picture of human agents as motivated by ethical commitments and moral emotions rather than mere utility-seeking. Much of this work has been published before, and several of the essays pick very specific fights. There is a litany of complaints about the way modern economists think, and endless allusions to debates in the field, but especially in the first part there is a shortage of medium-level detail about what these debates are about, or whether they represent mainstream positions or marginal ones. There is a big picture, and there are very focused attacks on specific figures, but not enough about how they relate. I'm sure that if you are steeped in the field things look different. McCloskey counts fellow travellers in other fields as part of her intended audience, but in the opening chapters you will need a closer familiarity with the details than that. Still, I think I know what is going on. And I do not really get it. Philosophers of science often endorse a picture of science that was advanced by Larry Laudan in his important book Science and Values. The picture says that there is a three-way relationship between the goals, the theories and the methods in any given field. Choose your goal - for example, maximising predictive accuracy with a view to control over nature. Well then, your theories ought to say how different methods will help to achieve your goals. And if you agree that only some methods are acceptable, then they, together with your goals, will heavily constrain what theories you can accept or develop. And last, a fixing of methods and theories will narrow the range of the goals you can reach. Nobody seems to wants to argue that economics has successful prediction as its goal. It is sometimes said that economics can follow historical sciences like evolutionary biology and make predictions (sometimes called ‘retrodictions’) about the traces of the past we will discover. But these are not predictions in the sense that philosophers of science have usually used the term – they tend to be, as Carol Cleland put it, prognostications rather than predictions, in that they cannot be properly inferred from theories but are more vaguely related to them. And in any case predictive failures do not fail to legitimate historical sciences. So what is economics a science of? For McCloskey, the key prong of Laudan's trident is the goal; the theories and methods of economics are properly constrained by the goal of human enrichment. The world has become unimaginably richer in the past two centuries. McCloskey attributes this – as readers of her bourgeois trilogy will know – to a package deal of intellectual and moral innovations that led to a widespread acceptance of polite commercial norms. Humanomics is about recapturing that vision and organising social science around its values. It will make our conception of human beings more morally serious and return us to an economics that drives enrichment by taking ideas seriously. There is a lot one could say about this; for example, the assumption that political economy of a rich modern country should be properly modelled on that which benefits much poorer societies. However, let me draw attention to one big issue, which is the way McCloskey handles values. McCloskey professes to hate utilitarianism; she recounts her scornful response to Gary Becker's defence of the death penalty on the grounds that every homicide by the state deters seven murders. She thinks means-end reasoning in moral matters belittles sentiments such as honour that mark important aspects of human moral life. McCloskey is big on honour, and regards Saving Private Ryan as a worthwhile moral parable. Yet at the same time her response to the destruction of industries by innovation is not to worry. We should not worry because innovation for profit makes society as a whole better off. My grandfather's family ran a carriage business and were impoverished by the rise of the internal combustion engine. McCloskey thinks their loss of income and status was a price worth paying for widespread enrichment and incentivisation of new technology. I understand the sentiment, but how can McCloskey express it? The idea that the suffering of some is justified by the greater prosperity of others just is utilitarian thinking. Why is utilitarianism suddenly acceptable in this context? I think I can see some ways this conflict might be addressed; one could, for example, take Mill's line, and say that economics is concerned with the ‘portion of the phenomena of society which emanates from the industrial or productive operations of mankind’ (System of Logic, 6.9.3). If we isolate the economy as a scientific object from the rest of society, and correspondingly isolate the calculative, acquisitive, rational part of human nature from the rest, then maybe we can say that utilitarian reasoning has a proper province with respect to those phenomena. But this is not a way out of the dilemma McCloskey can adopt, because the whole thrust of her project is that we should not isolate the economic in this way – for her, economics is not, as Mill called it, ‘a separate science’. So what if we consistently adopt McCloskey's own principles, and argue that market operations should be judged by non-utilitarian considerations? A society organised on those principles would balance commerce against tradition – the honour of the aristocrat, the virtue of the female, the veneration of the sacred, the well-being of the outcompeted carriage merchant. This is not McCloskey's vision, but she wants to have this vision and her vision together – an economics that is devoted to overall enrichment because it does the greatest good for the greatest number, married to a conception of human nature that resists utilitarian values. There is much to like about this book, but I do not think the pieces fit together." @default.
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• W4386073663 date "2023-08-22" @default.
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• W4386073663 title "Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, by DeirdreMcCloskey (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2022), pp. xi + 228." @default.
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